Joseph Agassi

Hilary Putnam makes two related points in his recent collection of essays: (1) Values can be rational, and their inescapable intrusion into every kind of discourse is welcome. (2) Ignoring or suppressing this fact is common yet irrational. This is of course true; yet the intrusion in question can be trivial, and it can be problematic. Putnam ignores this here. The book is pleasant to read; it is infused with friendly and appreciative personal anecdotes and observations. It is almost entirely critical and almost always in a friendly way. Yet it is often unclear. In almost every discussion here, the author announces one item and discusses another almost identical with it but one much easier to discuss. Key Words: values • rationality • positivism • Carnap • Popper.

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Is methodological theory a priori or a posteriori knowledge? It is perhaps a posteriori improvable, somehow. For example, Duhem discovered that since scientists disagree on methods, they do not always know what they are doing. How is methodological innovation possible? If it is inapplicable in retrospect, then it is not universal and so seems defective; if it is, then there is a miracle here. Even so, the new explicit awareness of rules previously implicitly known is in itself beneficial. And so, improved methodology may make for improved methods. Hence, methodology is in part descriptive, in part prescriptive. Knowing this, a methodologist might improve his own studies. For example, Popper would then not hasten to conclude from the fact that past scientists depended on positive evidence that they had better do so in future as well; perhaps a lesser concern with confirmation may increase the productivity of scientific inquiry.

A century and a half ago James Spedding wrote a two-volume review of Macaulay’s Essay on Bacon’. That review inaugurated a career dedicated to the study of Bacon, including a biography that is still, perhaps, the best extant, and the preparation of the collected works-by Ellis, Spedding, and Heath-which is still the standard edition in Bacon scholarship. Had I treated Kuhn’s new book with a similar degree of attention, the result would be a book-length study of Max Planck and his contribution to twentieth-century thought. Let others take up that task. Here is a mere outline of the task, a few hints. Such a story as Kuhn has attempted to tell is, of necessity, full of loose ends. The choice of which loose end to tie up may be ad hoc; the choice is then open to criticism. Or, it may be in accord with some principle; the choice and the principle are then both open to criticism. A detail may be wrongly presented or rightly presented but its role in the story wrongly judged. Nor is this all: the list of what may go wrong and be open to critical comments is already too long. A reviewer must, then, either cover all grounds by a book-length review, or make many questionable choices tacitly. Both options are unsatisfactory, and all that is left for the reviewer is to ask for his reader’s sympathy and indulgence and to attempt to be as transparent as possible. What is the book about? The title suggests the answer: it is the story of how the study of black-body radiation (see below) led to the idea that matter emits and absorbs radiation, i.e., light, not continuously, as required by the wave-theory of light, but in discrete bursts of energy, now known as photons. This idea was revolutionary. Thomas S. Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, has now written the story of one of the greatest and most exciting scientific revolutions of all time that of the quantization of light: the quantum revolution. One might expect this book, then, to be not merely about the quantum revolution but also about its structure. Is it? Most authorities on the matter tend to answer in the negative. This review takes the opposite stand and is thus a tribute to this book.

Criticism of the welfare state is mostly economic and administrative, relating to the resultant national debt and state bureaucracy. Budget cuts and privatization may help but not eliminate the difficulty. Yet, the primary concern of the welfare system is neither economic nor administrative; so, the force of this criticism is limited. To restrict the discussion to the defunct free-markets and centralized economies is to distort and to obstruct clear thinking on national priorities. Criticism of any welfare system should not aim at the revival of these extremist solutions, but raise cost-effectiveness. All this holds for the medical sector in particular.

John O. Wisdom (1947) says, [new-style] analytic philosophy has resulted from a radical change in our theory of definition, and the resulting devaluation of the place of essential definitions in science and philosophy. Most traditional and most current metaphysics are deeply involved with essential definitions. This invites the support of the proposal of Stuart Hampshire to salvage as much of metaphysics as possible. It is the proposal to correct Wittgenstein’s erroneous demand to oust all metaphysics by limiting it to the demand to oust metaphysical systems that rest on essential definitions, and to rectify logic accordingly. This is tantamount to the suggestion to oust the pretense to know what scientific theories will win assent and keep it to the end of days. It is possible to restrict further: whenever possible, we should reinterpret essential definitions to read them as conjectures. Perhaps surprisingly this proposal tallies with comments made by even the most ardent and significant members of the analytic school, such as Neurath and Carnap, not to mention Hintikka: insofar as metaphysics was ancillary to science, they all agreed, they did not object to it. This concession fully reverses their radicalism. It was a great loss that they ignored Wisdom. The limitation of anti-metaphysics to anti-essentialism is a modification that tallies with the current pervasive dissent from Wittgenstein in the analytic school, namely, the rejection of any grammatical criterion of demarcation of metaphysics Wittgenstein-style. This allows for the possible recognition of the value of some metaphysics.

1. Where is the trouble? Let us take it for granted that a person can be interested in researches that go on in different fields, for example, in physics and in psychology. Undoubtedly, this will raise problems not shared by a person whose research is confined to one field only. There may be difficulty in deciding which of the two is that person's primary field of interest; members of his secondary field of interest may be flattered or feel slighted or even threatened by his intrusion into their field. Let us fully ignore all these problems and pretend that they do not exist. Nevertheless, there may be different kinds of problems, and such that are hard to overlook. For example, a researcher may study the behavior of another researcher as a secondary field of research or even, worse, as a primary one. A professor of medical education who has studied the lecturing techniques of professors in his own medical school and found them very poor, meets with an understandable hostility in his own medical school. A (structuralist) sociologist may discover that his colleagues persistently speak of their teaching chores as serious undertakings and as sheer nuisance; he will be considered an enemy of education. A social psychologist may find a certain group of mathematicians or physicists in his own school or country over-ambitious and so rather unfriendly to competitors; they will then not like that social psychologist. A professor of education who thinks that biology professors shamelessly and immorally exploit their graduate students by forcing them to play cogs in their own research machinery, will find it difficult to get a job in a university with a strong biology department. And so it goes on. Let us agree that we can live with this difficulty too and even defend the researcher who meets this kind of hostility. Now the worst case is still different: i.e. when the outsider is also inte rested in the same research as the insider, and criticizes it and offers better ways of doing it..

Legitimating the use of metaphysics in scientific research constituted a farreaching methodological revolution, invalidating the inductivist demands that science be guided by empirical information alone. Thus, science became tentative. The revolution was established when pioneering historians of science, Max Jammer among them, exhibited the working of metaphysics in scientific research. This raises many problems, since most metaphysical ideas are poor as compared with scientific ones. Yet taking science to be the effort to explain facts in a comprehensive manner, makes some metaphysics unavoidable, and presents the better metaphysics as the possible frameworks within which older scientific theories may be reinterpreted and improved and newer ones may be developed.